Category: Hardware

AMD may have announced that the Ryzen 5000 series would support X470 and B450 motherboards from January 2021, but ASUS has other ideas. Multiple motherboard manufacturers, including ASUS, have already released updated BIOSes for 500 series chipsets, but the company has dropped X470 motherboards from future plans.

ASUS is yet to officially confirm this, but it is letting consumers know privately that this is the case. Apparently, the engineering department at ASUS has confirmed this, rather than a sales representative or customer service advisor. You can read the ensuing Reddit thread here, which has, unsurprisingly, received plenty of attention from AMD fans.

In May, AMD confirmed that it would ‘enable our motherboard partners with the code to support…AMD B450 and X470 motherboards’, giving some hope for Ryzen 5000 support. However, AMD has not instructed its partners to support B450 and X470 motherboards, so ASUS has decided against doing so. Seeing as ASUS is yet to confirm this publicly, then we would not be surprised if other motherboard manufacturers follow suit in dropping support for the B450 and X470 chipsets. 

Samsung has announced products that may be for professional photographers, vloggers or prosumers looking for a new and reliable full-sized SD card. The 2020 EVO Plus and PRO Plus models are all SDXC, but for the smallest 32GB SKU of each line, which are SDHC.

This variant of the PRO Plus series is also the only one that misses out on sequential write speeds that may reach 90 megabytes per second (MB/s), contenting itself with up to 60MB/s instead. However, it does get the sequential read speed of up to 100MB/s also associated with its 64GB, 128GB and 256GB siblings.

The latest EVO Plus cards, on the other hand, have that spec across the board. All of these share U3/Class 10 specs with the PRO Plus variants, except (again) for the 32GB EVO Plus (which is U1 and Class 10). However, all of this new UHS-I memory is equipped with Samsung’s new “seven-proof” protection.

This means they are resistant to drops of up to 5 meters, as well as the wear and tear that can result from up to 10,000 navigational swipes on the device in which a given card is installed, in addition to the more usual magnet-, shock-, water-, temperature- and x-ray-proofing conferred on “pro-level” SD cards.

The new Plus-series cards can be pre-ordered from now, and cost from US$6.99 for the EVO’s 32GB variant to $39.99 for its top-end 256GB version. The PROs range from $9.99 to $49.99 for the same sizes. They will all ship from Octber 19, 2020, with the exception of the 32 and 64GB PRO cards that are not projected to do so until November 2020.

u/Akira13645 on Reddit has observed that Intel has updated the Core i3-x100F series for the final quarter of 2020 (4Q2020). This recently-established line exists to offer budget processing without UHD graphics. The new i3-10100F still fits this mold, although it also has marked Comet Lake-afforded advantages over its predecessor.

For example, it is the first F-variant to exhibit Intel Hyper-Threading Technology – which means double the threads for its 4 cores for the first time. They can use Turbo Boost Max v2.0 for a maximal clock of 4.3GHz, whereas the i3-9100F could only go up to 4.2GHz. 

The i3-10100F also now supports up to 128GB of DDR4-2666 RAM, whereas its predecessor was rated for half that much DDR4-2400 memory. There is also a maximum bandwidth of 41.6 GB/s compared to 37.5 GB/s. The Comet Lake-based i3 F variant also uses the LGA 1200 socket rather than the LGA 1151.

Then again, the two chipsets share a TDP of 65W, a 6MB cache, have 2-channel memory and are, of course, still both 14nm. The Core i3-10100F is also still pitched at low-powered PCs, probably thin clients and tablets, and has an MRSP of US$79 to $97.

Intel vPro-enabled processors are typically slower than their non-vPro counterparts due to the overhead necessary for the integrated security features. The vPro-enabled Core i7-10810U, for example, is about 10 to 15 percent slower than the consumer-oriented Core i7-10710U even though the higher-digit naming convention might suggest otherwise.

The latest vPro CPU we tested was the 10th gen Comet lake-H Core i9-10885H as found on the Dell Precision 3551. When compared to its consumer-oriented counterpart the Core i7-10875H, the Core i9 CPU is slower in multi-threaded applications by about 20 percent according to CineBench benchmarks. Other benchmarks like Blender, 7-Zip, LibreOffice, and HWBOT show a smaller gap of about 10 percent between the two processors.

The 20 percent performance deficit against the Core i7-10875H is wider than anticipated, but we do believe the i9-10885H is able to narrow the gap if configured on laptops with better cooling. The CPU in our Precision 3551 test unit, for example, would stabilize at just 2.7 GHz when at 100 percent utilization which is only 300 MHz above the base clock rate. Intel rates the processor for much higher Turbo Boost clock rates of up to 5.3 GHz meaning there is plenty of untouched performance headroom if laptops are able to support it. The Precision 3551, being a budget mobile workstation, likely wasn’t designed to run a Core i9 CPU anywhere near its maximum potential.

It’s unlikely that we’ll get to test many more Core i9-10885H laptops as this particular processor is quite uncommon, but it’s something to keep in mind for those who want to squeeze as much performance as possible out of their vPro-enabled business laptops or mobile workstations.

Intel has introduced new processors dedicated to IoT applications at its latest Industrial Summit (September 2020). The chipsets are 11th-gen and have Xe graphics with a maximum of 4 cores/8 threads each and TDPs of up to 28W. Nevertheless, they are still capable of supporting up to 4 4K/60fps HDR (or dual 8K/60fps SDR) monitors.

Therefore, they may be more able to drive modern, demanding display rigs or machine vision, both of which may be informed by AI. To this end, the Tiger Lake derivatives are also enhanced with features such as Intel Deep Learning Boost and Time Coordinated Computing. They are geared toward reduced latency and improved cycles, which may benefit robotics or next-gen edge.

The new Intel Core for IoT processors are, accordingly, essentially E-variants of previously-announced 11th-gen chipsets. They are the i7-1185G7E, i5-1145G7E and i3-1115G4E. There are also industry-specific SKUs: the i7-1185GRE, i5-1145GRE and i3-1115GRE. They clock up to 4.4GHz, have integrated GPUS with up to 96 execute units (EUs) and up to 12MB caches (in the i7s).

Samsung now officially pitches its state-of-the-art 980 PRO solid-state drive (SSD) at “professionals and consumers who want cutting-edge performance in their high-end PCs, workstations and game consoles”. On that note, it is slated to be the storage associated with the PlayStation 5. The OEM made no mention of this in its launch announcement, however, although it did confirm its PCIe 4.0-readiness.

Samsung notes that it has developed its own Elpis controller, DRAM and triple-figure-layered V-NAND so as to best harness this updated interface. Therefore, it may support the 980 PRO’s rated 7GB/s and 5GB/s sequential read and write speeds. The NVMe memory may also get up to 1 million IOPS in random read and write speeds, if only in its 1TB SKU.

On that note, the new SSD comes in 250GB, 500GB or 1TB SKUs. Each of them will feature the 980 PRO’s new heat-spreader sticker and nickel controller coating for “efficient thermal management”. Samsung has set approximate pricing guidelines that start at about US$89.99 for the 980 PRO’s base model.

AMD’s Zen 3 and RDNA 2 are perhaps the most anticipated computing platforms for 2020. Now we have a firm date on when we will see them.

AMD posted a teaser video for its next generation of GPUs. The Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs, which are built on the RDNA 2 architecture, will officially launch on October 28. Nicknamed “Big Navi,” these graphics cards will be AMD’s answer to Nvidia’s recently released GeForce RTX 3000 series cards.

AMD has a big task in front of it; Nvidia’s new Ampere cards seem to be a sizable upgrade over the RTX 2000 series. The RTX 2000 cards, built on Nvidia’s Turing architecture, beat AMD’s RDNA 1 (Navi) cards by a fair margin. AMD has a big gap to make up in order to outperform Nvidia. The veil will officially be lifted on RDNA 2 on October 28.

A curious note in the teaser video for the RDNA 2 launch is the mention of support for “PCs and consoles.” This should remove most of the doubt as to whether or not the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 will use RDNA 2 GPUs. It seems that this will indeed be the case. 

AMD will also officially launch its next CPU architecture, Zen 3, on October 8. Stating that “it’s going to be an exciting fall for gamers,” AMD CEO Lisa Su posted a teaser video of Zen 3 on Twitter. There’s not a lot we know about Zen 3, but current speculation is that it will be built on the same (or similar) 7 nm process as Zen 2 but may reconfigure how the chip is arranged, most notably the L3 cache.

We reported yesterday that the upcoming Ryzen 4000 chips (codenamed Vermeer) will feature up to 10 multithreaded cores and may include improved overclocking features, something that will entice gamers. We’ll know more about Zen 3 when it officially launches next month.